1500prep

Question type

Cross-text connections on the SAT: how would one author respond?

In a cross-text question, find each author's main position before reading the choices. The answer is grounded in the responding author's own evidence or reasoning, applied to the other text's claim. Wrong choices give one author the other's view, invent agreement, or overstate how far the two disagree.

Two short texts on the same topic are followed by a question about how the author of one text, or someone named in it, would respond to a claim or finding in the other.

College Board's question bank has 38 of these, and half are rated Hard.

  • 38 in College Board's question bank, 50% rated Hard
  • 49 practice questions of this type

Why students miss it

Swapping positions: a choice that uses Text 1's evidence to answer for Text 2's author.

Overstating the disagreement. Often one author accepts the other's data and disputes only the conclusion.

Answering from your own view of the topic rather than from what the responding text says.

How to spot it

  • "Text 1" and "Text 2" headings.
  • "Based on the texts, how would ... most likely respond to / regard ..."

The method

Two positions, then the response

Write each author's claim and evidence in a few words.

The responder has new evidence
they would use it to challenge or qualify the claim.
The responder disputes a method
they would say the conclusion depends on that method.
A choice adds a fact neither text gives
rule it out.

Two real questions

From the 1500prep bank, the way the app shows them. Answer first, then open the explanation.

1Question 1 of 2#1468Craft

Text 1

Printed editions of Emily Dickinson's poems typically render all of her dashes identically, but in her handwritten manuscripts the marks vary considerably, some slanting upward, others downward, and some stretching nearly twice the length of others. Critic Miriam Hale argues that this variation is deliberate. In Hale's interpretation, Dickinson devised a private notation, with each kind of dash signaling a particular inflection of the voice.

Text 2

Literary scholar Owen Price examined hundreds of Dickinson's personal letters, documents she never intended as poetry or performance. He found the same assortment of dashes, slanted and level, short and elongated, distributed in roughly the same proportions as in her poems. Price concludes that the angle of a dash more likely reflects where it fell on the line, since the marks tilt more steeply near the right margin, where her hand would naturally descend.

Based on the texts, how would Price most likely regard the conclusion in Text 1?

Pick an answer, then check it.
Show the answer and explanation
Hale argues that the different dash shapes are deliberate, private marks showing changes in voice, which suggests they guide how the poems should sound when read. Price found the same mix of dashes, in about the same proportions, in personal letters that Dickinson never meant to be performed. He concludes that a dash's angle reflects where it falls on the line. Because the variation appears even in writing that has nothing to do with voice, Price would doubt Hale's conclusion.
2Question 2 of 2#1456Craft

Text 1

Medieval chroniclers occasionally described total lunar eclipses in which the Moon turned so dark that it nearly vanished, an effect that occurs when volcanic particles in the atmosphere block the sunlight that normally bends around Earth onto it. Climate historian Hana Ruiz and her team compared seven such accounts with sulfate layers in polar ice cores, which preserve fallout from powerful eruptions and can be dated independently. In six instances, a dark eclipse fell within months of a sulfate spike.

Text 2

Monastic chronicles are appealing sources for scientists, but historian Pieter Vos urges caution. Chroniclers frequently copied passages from older manuscripts and treated a darkened Moon as a conventional omen of disaster, so a vivid description may reflect literary habit rather than observation. Vos therefore doubts that any medieval eclipse account can reliably date a specific eruption.

Based on the texts, how would Ruiz and her team most likely regard the underlined portion in Text 2?

Pick an answer, then check it.
Show the answer and explanation
Vos warns that vivid descriptions of a dark Moon may come from copying older texts or from literary convention rather than from real observation. Ruiz's team checked the eclipse accounts against ice-core sulfate layers, which are dated independently. Six of the seven accounts fell within months of a sulfate spike. If the descriptions were only literary habit, such a close match would be unlikely. So Ruiz's team would most likely see Vos's concern as reasonable but weakened by their results.

Questions students ask

How do you approach cross-text questions on the SAT?

Summarise each text's claim and evidence in a phrase, then ask how the responding author's evidence bears on the other's claim. The answer must be supported by the responding text.

Do the two authors always disagree?

No. Some questions ask how one would build on or partly accept the other's view. Watch for choices that exaggerate the disagreement.

Practise this type until it is automatic

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